Spices have been used to prepare food essentially since humans started cooking, and were some of the most valuable traded commodities in the ancient and medieval world. Additionally, the need to open new routes for spice trade catalyzed a widespread exploration of the continents. Today, spices are common and plentiful in developed nations, and the wide variety of spices creates a need for both professional and amateur cooks to store and organize their cooking ingredients.
A common kitchen has dozens of jars that contain spices, and these jars commonly reside on racks, turntables, or shelves that allow somewhat easy access to the commonly overwhelming morass of containers. Unfortunately, such systems are undesirable and provide many problems for cooks. First, the spices are commonly stored in container volumes that are too large, and the volumes stored cannot be completely used within a reasonable amount of time, if ever. Although cooks would ideally like to have large quantities of spices available so that they never run out of ingredients, they also face the issue of spice spoilage. Even spices that are stored in sealed glass jars can spoil due to oxidation, moisture, exposure to sunlight, bacteria, mold, or simple decomposition, and it is preferable to obtain fresh spices frequently. Next, when cooking certain recipes, dishes or varieties of food, cooks will commonly use a selected set of spices each time. Current spice organization systems do not allow a user to easily configure sets of spices to be used for specific cooking applications and the user must instead sort through all the stored spices each time the user cooks a meal, which is highly inefficient.
Stackable containers could be used to store and organize a plurality of spices; however, existing stackable containers are undesirable because they are not adequately configured to hold and dispense all types of spices. For example, many types of spices are powders or particulate matter that can cause a mess when used with conventional stackable containers because when conventional stacked containers are opened, the powdered or particulate spices can easily stick to capping containers or coupling systems and escape when the container is opened. Moreover, although current stackable containers provide some seal, they do not commonly provide an airtight seal, which is preferable when a user wants to keep the contents of the container fresh and unspoiled.
Additionally, each spice has specific dispensing and containing needs that are not served by conventional stackable containers. For example, salt and pepper are commonly stored in containers that have lids with different sized holes or a different number of holes—this is because salt is used more sparingly than pepper and needs to be dispensed at a slower rate than pepper. Additionally, many spices need to be leveled when used in conjunction with measuring spoons. In addition to not being configured to level a measuring spoon, many of both stackable and non-stackable containers known in the art are too small to be used with measuring spoons at all.